Laszlo Tompa

Statement

I’m ceramist and tile designer. The idea of these sculptures came into my mind during designing periodic wall tiles. I did experiments with regular triangle and square based meshes. I developed these to 3D tiles, in a way that I’ve span them around their axis so I got rotation axis objects and that were halved. My starting point is always the form and I choose the material to that. At this point I changed to wood. My first woodwork was the “Cube illusion” box. The final complex product is assembled together from bespoke wooden revolutions, manufactured by copy lathe. The 2D templates for the individual elements were CNC cut. These separate revolutions are then fitted together by hand and fixed. This box can be viewed on my webpage.

Artworks

My starting point is the sphericon. After years of experiments I realized that it’s possible to create a body consisting of more than two elements and also having the same properties like the basic sphericon composed of two elements. I think these multi-element shapes are more suitable for creating sculptures than design objects. This sculpture is composed of three different symmetric half-bodies of revolution (54 altogether). Both sides of the sculpture are the same just rotated by 180 degree horizontally. Like in the case of the sphericon the surfaces are joining seamlessly.

This sculpture has a similar structure as the Circle star but it is rotated by 180 degree only vertically. It is composed of 66 elements, each consisting of two different elements.